Faculty News

A.K. Burns (Visiting Faculty)

Visiting faculty A.K. Burns will be involved in the following events:

EXHIBITION:

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial
Opening: May 17, 2013 / 6-8pm
May 17 – September 8, 2013
International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street New York NY

TALKING + PUBLISHING:

May 11, 2013 / 5-7pm
Parsons The New School for Design
25 East 13th Street, 5th Floor

PROPOSALS FOR AN IMPRACTICAL EDUCATION
A Joint Book Launch by SHIFTER and Sobercove Press
May 22, 2013/ 6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor

DENNIS OPPENHEIM: Form-Energy-Subject
Screening + Conversation
Moderated by Jenny Jaskey
in conversation with A.K. Burns, Ajay Kurian and Yve Laris-Cohen
More info: http://www.eai.org/publicProgramArtists.htm?id=194

Community Action Center X-Cuntry tour 2013
May 31-June 15 2013

May 31 / LAUNCH w/SFMoMA @ The Roxie Theater
June 1 / Long Beach, CA
June 2 / Las Vegas, NV
June 3 / Tuscon, AZ
June 4 / Albuquerque, NM
June 5 / Tulsa, OK
June 6 / Dallas, TX
June 7 / Austin, TX
June 9 / New Orleans, LA
June 10 / Missippi
June 12 / Liberty, TN
June 13 / Louisville, KY
June 14 / Columbus , OH
June 15 / Pittsburgh, PA
SCREENING + TOUR WRAP UP @ The Kitchen, NYC —TBA

Visting faculty Siemon Allen wins 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

In its eighty-ninth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

Visiting Faculty Siemon Allen
Guggenheim Fellowship
Twelve-month Fellowship from August 2013- August 2014

South Africa has a rich musical history — one that remains significantly undocumented. During the apartheid years (1948-1994) music was a catalyst for social change and a chronicle of a dynamic historical period. Through decades of instability, either through malicious control or neglect, much of this history has been destroyed or forgotten and remains lost to subsequent generations.

For the last seven years I have been involved in an extensive project to archive this past through a focus on the visual aspect of these audio artifacts. Records, my most recent endeavor, is rooted in a substantial collection of South African audio consisting of over 2500 items. The project has generated a series of varied artworks sourced from this ongoing accumulation including a number of site-specific sculptural installations, a series of large-scale digital prints, and most significantly a visual archive in the form of a searchable web-based database that can be viewed at www.flatinternational.org.

There are a number of significant collections of South African music in various institutions across the United States, Europe and South Africa. For example, last year I visited the Ballantine Collection at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa to photograph their collection of over 500 shellac discs. This archiving activity focused solely on the information contained in the labels text and resulted in a visual record of the title, artist, recording company and other historical data of the recordings. In return a set of images was given back to the Ballantine Collection.

During the Fellowship period I will be working with other such institutions and individuals to continue this documentation of South African material in the same way, ultimately adding digital images to the web based database that I have begun to build and expanding the visual archive and discography of South African material. I will also continue exploring ways in which these images sourced from South African audio artifacts can inform other aspects of my larger studio practice.

is a South African artist who is based in the United States. For the past ten years he has been exploring issues of national identity and branding through a series of collection projects. His research-based studio practice has evolved out of an interest in how mass-produced items — newspapers, stamps, records — function as carriers of information and operate in the construction of image. His process is not unlike that of an archivist in that he systematically accumulates these artifacts, which he ultimately catalogues, displays, or uses as source material.

www.gf.org
www.siemonallen.org

COMMUNITY ACTION CENTER: a sociosexual video by A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner

Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 2pm

The Byrd Theatre / 2908 W Cary St Richmond, VA 23221

**It’s FREE! And post screening conversation with Visiting Faculty A.K. Burns & Liz Canield**

Community Action Center is a 70 minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place.Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.

Because the video contains sexually explicit content, the term ‘porn’ is relevant and the artists have an interest in exploring the trappings of the term itself. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. Queer sex and feminist agency is a shared acknowledgment of reciprocal penetration. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music and original compositions by artists culled from the worldwide sisterhood. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Using the communal environment of screenings to exercise the mystical and discreet lost spaces of homo-social configuration, the artists have created a reason and a space to reflect on the cultural realness of homegrown queer sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.